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I'm much less concerned with Palantir being used internally by corporations to detect information leaks (although in practice this also means it will be used to

I'm much less concerned with Palantir being used internally by corporations to detect information leaks (although in practice this also means it will be used to quash whistleblowers), since that's at least a viable use for their technology. And it's good that Palantir is pivoting towards less invasive applications of their technology such as supply chain tracking. But the article touches on the biggest issue with Palantir, which is that they seem to be completely fine with allowing law enforcement agencies to use their software for parallel construction, which is in my opinion a pretty egregious violation of the 4th amendment. Although it may be constitutional for police departments to purchase data from e.g. Facebook or some data broker, even local police departments are known to employ dragnet-style surveillance through things like Stingray devices. Of course we have a number of three-letter agencies, also Palantir customers, who don't even need to pretend that they're following the 4th amendment. Since Palantir is essentially enabling the construction of all the tools required for a complete surveillance state, and actively using their tools for that purpose for financial gain, I think that makes them one of the least ethical companies in tech. I certainly wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew I was writing software with the explicit purpose of being able to track down rebels in Yemen, catch illegal immigrants, and violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.

jonnybgood 9y ago
Can you expand on exactly how Palantir is used for parellel construction?
- taneq 9y ago
  They dig up data telling the police where to look. The police then look in just the right place and "legitimately find" the evidence that they would never have stumbled on and couldn't have legally known was there.
- opportune 9y ago
  Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is loaded into Palantir's software. Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a warrant, it can be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire it was through unconstitutional practices. The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling. So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge, no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression that occurs as a result.
  - chii 9y ago
    > If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. why is that a bad thing? If the crime is victimless (such as any drug usage "crime"), then the issue isn't with the police, but with the state defining what "crime" is, and that definition doesn't align with the people's definition.
    - blitmap 9y ago
      There was no probable cause for you to be under surveillance prior to the "random" stop.
      - xpaqui 9y ago
        Some people just get more randomly selected than others, a lot more.
    - ameister14 9y ago
      Any interaction with the police is a potentially violent interaction with the State. Even if that were not the case, limiting infringement on your rights as much as possible is a good thing, and the government has limitations placed on it for this reason. Stopping people for 'random' checks may violate those limitations.
    - ta76567656 9y ago
      Selective enforcement. Practice surveillance of the population. Select political opponent, as desired. Consult surveillance data. By random chance, sometimes you will find something. Parallel construct a case. Proceed to blackmail/extort/convict. Maintain political power. Repeat.
  - RedTennisRacket 9y ago
    You raise several good points, but a few clarifications here: - In our software that we deploy to police departments, generally the origin of any piece of information is tracked, as well as when it was entered and by who. The intention with this is to prevent this (and other) kinds of abuse. Malicious users can still abuse the system and do a parallel construction e.g. outside of our system or maybe in a way that the two actions (finding non-admissible data and finding admissible data) seem unrelated, but at that point they would be spending quite a bit of time and criminal energy on this. I don't think this would happen commonly for a variety of practical reasons (but ultimately there's no way to completely prevent it). Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy. If you fundamentally think the government is evil, palantir would probably not be the workplace for you. But once you see all of the bad things LE can prevent thanks to our software, it becomes pretty easy to believe in, even if individual bad actors exist (and always will), like racist cops, cops that abuse their power, etc. - If the organization is acquiring warrantless surveillance, then this generally means that there is the legislative base for them to acquire the data in the first place. What this looks like varies from country to country, some countries are much stricter with the regulations than others. So for instance in some countries it is not allowed to get information from a suspects public facebook profile, whereas in other countries this is considered A-OK. Especially in europe these things have recently become much more strict with GDPR (and similar rules that apply to government entities). You'd think that be a downside to palantir (less data = less value?) but actually it's a big business opportunity, because our software is the only thing available that is even remotely close in this space to having enough access control 'finesse' that it can enable organizations to be compliant to this law. So this is an area (and competitive advantage) we are investing a lot into -- and typically organizations go from 'completely non-compliant' when we arrive there (e.g. never even deleting data like license plates that are supposed to be deleted after 3 months etc, audit-logging any searches investigators do, limiting search scope, ...) to being fairly or even fully compliant. Now my personal opinion is that everyone should be able to enjoy great privacy and control over their PII just like citizens of the EU do, so if you live e.g. in the US other another country where the law is lax, you should consider taking political action to change the situation. Of course we never endorse or support any workflows that are in any way unconstitutional, and we have terminated relationships before with very big government agencies when we had doubt about whether our tools would be used for unlawful purposes. - The "big data" thing is a bit of a misunderstanding I think -- we have "big data" tools too, but usually these are not of interest to local law enforcement. If you check out our youtube channel you will find some (atrociously old!) videos of the tool that's popular in LLE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 for instance). This tool is in fact often used with just hand-entered information -- analysts create objects (e.g. persons, links between them) in their investigation. So the data really isn't that big and mostly hand-curated, and the tool works fine without mass data collection (better than with, perhaps). Most of what local law enforcement does with 'big data' tools is to generate reports like crime statistics. "Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people" -- actually, they really do! Any police department of any size that has existed for a while will have a database with millions of convictions, suspects, court-cases etc in them. Usually on some crufty mainframe or in some crufty old SQL database that contains a lot of terribly inconsistent data (dead links, data duplication, etc.) Also sometimes some of this data is shared between countries, states etc. You can find some videos on youtube of our CEO talking about the challenges of data integration and such. Ultimately of course there is a general statistical trend (belief?) that 'more data is better', because if there is more and more complete data, you have a bigger chance of finding that connection between e.g. a terrorist and some billionaire who might be funding said terrorists, etc. At least up until a point (at which the data probably becomes just too noisy/hard to deal with, because every individual piece of information carries very little meaning. At least the NSA seems to subscribe to this belief according to their public statements, and I'd think if anyone knows about this stuff, it's them) and assuming you have the necessary CPU power and talent (data scientists) to actually do something useful with this data. Local law enforcement orgs like police generally lack the latter. In police departments, most users are only sophisticated enough to run searches for things like names, SSN, number plates etc, really. - We generally know a lot about how our software is used at most of our installations, and almost always actively take steps to prevent abuse (auditing etc). Most government organizations will not let us see things like what their analysts exactly searched for (because that is obviously sensitive information) but we do a lot of work to help organizations prevent abuse and insider threats at a higher level. As mentioned above, we have taken action in the past in situations where we suspected abuse. It's on a case-by-case basis, of course -- imagine if there is e.g. one analyst abusing the system, then that analyst getting fired/reprimanded would probably be sufficient action (obviously this is not in our responsibility), but if we suspect systematic abuse or we see signs of repeated abuse without repercussions, then we might pull out completely.
- dpwm 9y ago
  Let's say I'm law enforcement and I have some information obtained in a way which wouldn't stand up even in the most farcical of courtrooms. What I can do is use surveillance tools to find a way to effectively entrap you, to gather evidence. Think of it like a tip-off that you're not allowed to have. Palantir specialises in providing tools to analyze and aggregate big data. If law enforcement has an interest in it, it's probably for dragnet-style surveillance. The problem is that the 4th amendment means there must be reasonable suspicion before the investigation can begin. Most dragnet-style surveillance is incompatible with the 4th amendment. So law enforcement has to construct a reason for investigating the case that they should never have been investigating.
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    If the data was sourced from public information that the target willingly posted online, does law enforcement even need to use parallel construction? Couldn’t they use the palantir data to obtain a warrant for more thorough searches? I too have a problem with business models that invade our privacy. But I think it’s a bit disingenuous to conflate “private information” with information that you voluntarily posted on the internet. Whatever happened to educating people that what they post on the internet is permanent? Dragnets over public data are a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of user education and understanding of what data they generate and share.
    - DataWorker 9y ago
      No, not really. We don’t expect all of our actions to be monitored and collected 24/7 throughout the course of our lives when going about our business offline and then used to entrap us. We should have a similar standard when it comes to our civil rights in the digital realm.
    - dpwm 9y ago
      I wasn't even thinking about public data. There's a lot of data that law enforcement already collects. What about license plate data, data from IMSI catchers, and leaked data. Add in the publicly available online data and you can supposedly build up quite a profile about them. What if somebody is arrested and happens to have a very convenient data set on a lot of people, such as data used for marketing purposes. Is it okay if those people are stopped and searched on the basis that somebody else held data about them and the police have supposed that 10% of the clients are suspected of criminality? Normally there is supposed to be evidence that the crime took place before an investigation can begin. If law enforcement starts with the evidence and then look for the crime that fits it, that's something different.
- 2close4comfort 9y ago
  New Orleans PD...there was an article about it here recently. That is PT/Palantir's vision of the future. It is going to be pretty damn hard to stop once it gets going hopefully Facebook being on the front page of MSN for a couple of days will we a reckoning because the things the average person does not realise would REALLY upset them.
  - athenot 9y ago
    On a positive note, New Orleans decided to not renew their contract with Palantir. I am not sure whether this is the result of that article or not.
    - selimthegrim 9y ago
      The mayor is leaving office.
- notacoward 9y ago
  I see other responses explaining how surveillance data, itself inadmissible in court, can lead people to evidence that is admissible. That's great, but it still makes it seem like only criminals are at risk. Far from it. It's important to remember that this same parallel construction can be used to strengthen false allegations or convictions, allegations or convictions under an unjust or unreasonable law (e.g. marijuana prohibitions), or discriminatory application of a proper law. Got a political opponent? Use Palantir to discover some little pecadillo, then engage the police/court machinery either to get an actual conviction or - almost as good - a whole bunch of negative PR. It's not just criminals. This kind of thing endangers everyone.
your-nanny 9y ago
Thiel's genuine commitment to freedom is questionable. Also, he's a misogynist and jerk.
- taneq 9y ago
  I feel these issues are orthogonal. There are plenty of nice people who have no commitment to freedom or privacy, and there are plenty of assholes (and even assholes-to-women!) who are also pretty passionate about both.
  - your-nanny 9y ago
    If they are orthogonal, then the conjunction is maximally informative...
    - aje403 9y ago
      Excellent point, now that you mention it, let's bring Trump and deep learning and 90's grunge into the discussion to form a maximal eigenbasis of discussion
      - your-nanny 9y ago
        Except most of those have no bearing on the conduct of Palantir, obviously, while the character of Thiel very much does.
        aje403 9y ago
        That's not obvious. In fact, it's quite likely that my reading Trump's tweets and news along with my internet history from the early 2000's indicating an interest in Nirvana may have a weak correlative effect in a deep learning system that indicates I am slightly more susceptible to committing certain crimes or personality affects. Ergo, can we all refocus this discussion of universal privacy rights violation on my partisan social group interests?
- 9y ago
PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
>But the article touches on the biggest issue with Palantir, which is that they seem to be completely fine with allowing law enforcement agencies to use their software for parallel construction I think that any company that works for the government to any degree is considered part of the government and is bound by all rules a government agency/employee would be.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Yes and no. Government pushes lots of compliance down in contractors and state government, but tends to not push down transparency requirements.
mcguire 9y ago
Palantir's repeated forays into politics are a bit troubling as well, particularly when combined with the issues you mention.
- bob88 9y ago
  What are their repeated forays into politics?
amelius 9y ago
> I certainly wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew I was writing software with the explicit purpose of being able to track down rebels in Yemen, catch illegal immigrants, and violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. Perhaps open-source licenses should explicitly exclude use in certain applications. Even if not legally enforceable, it would serve as a constant reminder to developers who DO work in these fields of what they are doing.
- currysausage 9y ago
  Something along the lines of "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil"? ;) https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license
  - amelius 9y ago
    s/shall/should rather/ This raises some good points, but that was to be expected as licenses are a tricky business. I do think our profession needs more awareness of ethics, and a usage suggestion (rather than an order) in the license of software may be a good start.
  - Latty 9y ago
    When I was at IBM the story about IBM legal asking for permission to use JSLint for evil was a classic. The original post appears to be dead, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 discusses it.
    - schoen 9y ago
      The Internet Archive has an archived copy of the blog post, which links to the original source at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&feature=player_detailpage#t=2480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&feature=player_d...
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Wow 2002 was so long ago. We had no idea. What am I saying? Most of us still have no idea.
walshemj 9y ago
Let met get this right you ae cool with "corporations" doing this with zero oversight but not with law enforcement and TLA's who have at least some legal oversight. Are you are also cool with companies in the past hiring pinkertons to kill people also - because that's where your argument is leading.
- randcraw 9y ago
  The difference is that corporations closely monitor only their own employees while Palantir closely monitors EVERYBODY. Corporations take an interest in tracking people only to stratify them into groups suited to specific ad strategies. The worst their errors will do is pepper your browser and email with bad ads. Not so with Palantir when their tracking data can misguide police departments, credit agencies, and even your employer into making your life a living hell. Surely any company with that much power must be held MUCH more accountable than they are now.
  - ng12 9y ago
    Palantir doesn't really _do_ anything. They don't collect the data, just save time/man-hours spent processing it. If that's your stance, Oracle/IBM are just as evil because they also sell to police departments to enable analysis. Facebook on the other hand is actively collecting the data. Without Facebook that database does not exist. In my mind that makes them far worse.
    - mercer 9y ago
      I think it's not a fringe opinion that Oracle/IBM are just as evil. I don't have a strong opinion on this issue at this point, but just saying.
nunya213 9y ago
Thiel is an exercise in contradiction. "In his view, the best way to avoid such scenarios in the future would be to provide the government the most cutting-edge technology possible and build in policing systems to make sure investigators use it lawfully." Prevent the police state by building the police state.
- randcraw 9y ago
  And then hire Palantir to monitor the police as well.
- pm90 9y ago
  Is it really? I think what he's trying to say is that we should have tools powerful enough to let the Government find/track people efficiently and correctly as long as there is a lawful reason for doing so. Its similar to the weak crypto arguments where Govt. agencies argue they should be able to break crypto protocols via a backdoor when there is a lawful reason to do so. That being said: the PATRIOT act and NSA's PRISM program have shown just how blatantly the US Govt. can abuse individual privacy and rights so I don't think its a good idea. Weak crypto using backdoors is just a terrible idea period. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the logic make sense in principle even though in practice it wouldn't work that way.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Perhaps what he's trying to say is, "I like money and power." "The logic" in this case is a proposition about how beings behave. That is, "We can build the largest prison system in history, give law enforcement unlimited surveillance powers and not expect massive injustices." That is simply wrong. Human beings are not like that.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - nunya213 9y ago
    For someone as deeply entrenched in Tech as Thiel you would think the "in practice" part would be quite clear to him.

jonnybgood 9y ago

Can you expand on exactly how Palantir is used for parellel construction?

taneq 9y ago
They dig up data telling the police where to look. The police then look in just the right place and "legitimately find" the evidence that they would never have stumbled on and couldn't have legally known was there.
opportune 9y ago
Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is loaded into Palantir's software. Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a warrant, it can be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire it was through unconstitutional practices. The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling. So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge, no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression that occurs as a result.
- chii 9y ago
  > If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. why is that a bad thing? If the crime is victimless (such as any drug usage "crime"), then the issue isn't with the police, but with the state defining what "crime" is, and that definition doesn't align with the people's definition.
  - blitmap 9y ago
    There was no probable cause for you to be under surveillance prior to the "random" stop.
    - xpaqui 9y ago
      Some people just get more randomly selected than others, a lot more.
  - ameister14 9y ago
    Any interaction with the police is a potentially violent interaction with the State. Even if that were not the case, limiting infringement on your rights as much as possible is a good thing, and the government has limitations placed on it for this reason. Stopping people for 'random' checks may violate those limitations.
  - ta76567656 9y ago
    Selective enforcement. Practice surveillance of the population. Select political opponent, as desired. Consult surveillance data. By random chance, sometimes you will find something. Parallel construct a case. Proceed to blackmail/extort/convict. Maintain political power. Repeat.
- RedTennisRacket 9y ago
  You raise several good points, but a few clarifications here: - In our software that we deploy to police departments, generally the origin of any piece of information is tracked, as well as when it was entered and by who. The intention with this is to prevent this (and other) kinds of abuse. Malicious users can still abuse the system and do a parallel construction e.g. outside of our system or maybe in a way that the two actions (finding non-admissible data and finding admissible data) seem unrelated, but at that point they would be spending quite a bit of time and criminal energy on this. I don't think this would happen commonly for a variety of practical reasons (but ultimately there's no way to completely prevent it). Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy. If you fundamentally think the government is evil, palantir would probably not be the workplace for you. But once you see all of the bad things LE can prevent thanks to our software, it becomes pretty easy to believe in, even if individual bad actors exist (and always will), like racist cops, cops that abuse their power, etc. - If the organization is acquiring warrantless surveillance, then this generally means that there is the legislative base for them to acquire the data in the first place. What this looks like varies from country to country, some countries are much stricter with the regulations than others. So for instance in some countries it is not allowed to get information from a suspects public facebook profile, whereas in other countries this is considered A-OK. Especially in europe these things have recently become much more strict with GDPR (and similar rules that apply to government entities). You'd think that be a downside to palantir (less data = less value?) but actually it's a big business opportunity, because our software is the only thing available that is even remotely close in this space to having enough access control 'finesse' that it can enable organizations to be compliant to this law. So this is an area (and competitive advantage) we are investing a lot into -- and typically organizations go from 'completely non-compliant' when we arrive there (e.g. never even deleting data like license plates that are supposed to be deleted after 3 months etc, audit-logging any searches investigators do, limiting search scope, ...) to being fairly or even fully compliant. Now my personal opinion is that everyone should be able to enjoy great privacy and control over their PII just like citizens of the EU do, so if you live e.g. in the US other another country where the law is lax, you should consider taking political action to change the situation. Of course we never endorse or support any workflows that are in any way unconstitutional, and we have terminated relationships before with very big government agencies when we had doubt about whether our tools would be used for unlawful purposes. - The "big data" thing is a bit of a misunderstanding I think -- we have "big data" tools too, but usually these are not of interest to local law enforcement. If you check out our youtube channel you will find some (atrociously old!) videos of the tool that's popular in LLE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 for instance). This tool is in fact often used with just hand-entered information -- analysts create objects (e.g. persons, links between them) in their investigation. So the data really isn't that big and mostly hand-curated, and the tool works fine without mass data collection (better than with, perhaps). Most of what local law enforcement does with 'big data' tools is to generate reports like crime statistics. "Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people" -- actually, they really do! Any police department of any size that has existed for a while will have a database with millions of convictions, suspects, court-cases etc in them. Usually on some crufty mainframe or in some crufty old SQL database that contains a lot of terribly inconsistent data (dead links, data duplication, etc.) Also sometimes some of this data is shared between countries, states etc. You can find some videos on youtube of our CEO talking about the challenges of data integration and such. Ultimately of course there is a general statistical trend (belief?) that 'more data is better', because if there is more and more complete data, you have a bigger chance of finding that connection between e.g. a terrorist and some billionaire who might be funding said terrorists, etc. At least up until a point (at which the data probably becomes just too noisy/hard to deal with, because every individual piece of information carries very little meaning. At least the NSA seems to subscribe to this belief according to their public statements, and I'd think if anyone knows about this stuff, it's them) and assuming you have the necessary CPU power and talent (data scientists) to actually do something useful with this data. Local law enforcement orgs like police generally lack the latter. In police departments, most users are only sophisticated enough to run searches for things like names, SSN, number plates etc, really. - We generally know a lot about how our software is used at most of our installations, and almost always actively take steps to prevent abuse (auditing etc). Most government organizations will not let us see things like what their analysts exactly searched for (because that is obviously sensitive information) but we do a lot of work to help organizations prevent abuse and insider threats at a higher level. As mentioned above, we have taken action in the past in situations where we suspected abuse. It's on a case-by-case basis, of course -- imagine if there is e.g. one analyst abusing the system, then that analyst getting fired/reprimanded would probably be sufficient action (obviously this is not in our responsibility), but if we suspect systematic abuse or we see signs of repeated abuse without repercussions, then we might pull out completely.
dpwm 9y ago
Let's say I'm law enforcement and I have some information obtained in a way which wouldn't stand up even in the most farcical of courtrooms. What I can do is use surveillance tools to find a way to effectively entrap you, to gather evidence. Think of it like a tip-off that you're not allowed to have. Palantir specialises in providing tools to analyze and aggregate big data. If law enforcement has an interest in it, it's probably for dragnet-style surveillance. The problem is that the 4th amendment means there must be reasonable suspicion before the investigation can begin. Most dragnet-style surveillance is incompatible with the 4th amendment. So law enforcement has to construct a reason for investigating the case that they should never have been investigating.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  If the data was sourced from public information that the target willingly posted online, does law enforcement even need to use parallel construction? Couldn’t they use the palantir data to obtain a warrant for more thorough searches? I too have a problem with business models that invade our privacy. But I think it’s a bit disingenuous to conflate “private information” with information that you voluntarily posted on the internet. Whatever happened to educating people that what they post on the internet is permanent? Dragnets over public data are a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of user education and understanding of what data they generate and share.
  - DataWorker 9y ago
    No, not really. We don’t expect all of our actions to be monitored and collected 24/7 throughout the course of our lives when going about our business offline and then used to entrap us. We should have a similar standard when it comes to our civil rights in the digital realm.
  - dpwm 9y ago
    I wasn't even thinking about public data. There's a lot of data that law enforcement already collects. What about license plate data, data from IMSI catchers, and leaked data. Add in the publicly available online data and you can supposedly build up quite a profile about them. What if somebody is arrested and happens to have a very convenient data set on a lot of people, such as data used for marketing purposes. Is it okay if those people are stopped and searched on the basis that somebody else held data about them and the police have supposed that 10% of the clients are suspected of criminality? Normally there is supposed to be evidence that the crime took place before an investigation can begin. If law enforcement starts with the evidence and then look for the crime that fits it, that's something different.
2close4comfort 9y ago
New Orleans PD...there was an article about it here recently. That is PT/Palantir's vision of the future. It is going to be pretty damn hard to stop once it gets going hopefully Facebook being on the front page of MSN for a couple of days will we a reckoning because the things the average person does not realise would REALLY upset them.
- athenot 9y ago
  On a positive note, New Orleans decided to not renew their contract with Palantir. I am not sure whether this is the result of that article or not.
  - selimthegrim 9y ago
    The mayor is leaving office.
notacoward 9y ago
I see other responses explaining how surveillance data, itself inadmissible in court, can lead people to evidence that is admissible. That's great, but it still makes it seem like only criminals are at risk. Far from it. It's important to remember that this same parallel construction can be used to strengthen false allegations or convictions, allegations or convictions under an unjust or unreasonable law (e.g. marijuana prohibitions), or discriminatory application of a proper law. Got a political opponent? Use Palantir to discover some little pecadillo, then engage the police/court machinery either to get an actual conviction or - almost as good - a whole bunch of negative PR. It's not just criminals. This kind of thing endangers everyone.

your-nanny 9y ago

Thiel's genuine commitment to freedom is questionable. Also, he's a misogynist and jerk.

taneq 9y ago
I feel these issues are orthogonal. There are plenty of nice people who have no commitment to freedom or privacy, and there are plenty of assholes (and even assholes-to-women!) who are also pretty passionate about both.
- your-nanny 9y ago
  If they are orthogonal, then the conjunction is maximally informative...
  - aje403 9y ago
    Excellent point, now that you mention it, let's bring Trump and deep learning and 90's grunge into the discussion to form a maximal eigenbasis of discussion
    - your-nanny 9y ago
      Except most of those have no bearing on the conduct of Palantir, obviously, while the character of Thiel very much does.
      - aje403 9y ago
        That's not obvious. In fact, it's quite likely that my reading Trump's tweets and news along with my internet history from the early 2000's indicating an interest in Nirvana may have a weak correlative effect in a deep learning system that indicates I am slightly more susceptible to committing certain crimes or personality affects. Ergo, can we all refocus this discussion of universal privacy rights violation on my partisan social group interests?
9y ago

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago

>But the article touches on the biggest issue with Palantir, which is that they seem to be completely fine with allowing law enforcement agencies to use their software for parallel construction I think that any company that works for the government to any degree is considered part of the government and is bound by all rules a government agency/employee would be.

Spooky23 9y ago
Yes and no. Government pushes lots of compliance down in contractors and state government, but tends to not push down transparency requirements.

mcguire 9y ago

Palantir's repeated forays into politics are a bit troubling as well, particularly when combined with the issues you mention.

bob88 9y ago
What are their repeated forays into politics?

amelius 9y ago

> I certainly wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew I was writing software with the explicit purpose of being able to track down rebels in Yemen, catch illegal immigrants, and violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. Perhaps open-source licenses should explicitly exclude use in certain applications. Even if not legally enforceable, it would serve as a constant reminder to developers who DO work in these fields of what they are doing.

currysausage 9y ago
Something along the lines of "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil"? ;) https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license
- amelius 9y ago
  s/shall/should rather/ This raises some good points, but that was to be expected as licenses are a tricky business. I do think our profession needs more awareness of ethics, and a usage suggestion (rather than an order) in the license of software may be a good start.
- Latty 9y ago
  When I was at IBM the story about IBM legal asking for permission to use JSLint for evil was a classic. The original post appears to be dead, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 discusses it.
  - schoen 9y ago
    The Internet Archive has an archived copy of the blog post, which links to the original source at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&feature=player_detailpage#t=2480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&feature=player_d...
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Wow 2002 was so long ago. We had no idea. What am I saying? Most of us still have no idea.

walshemj 9y ago

Let met get this right you ae cool with "corporations" doing this with zero oversight but not with law enforcement and TLA's who have at least some legal oversight. Are you are also cool with companies in the past hiring pinkertons to kill people also - because that's where your argument is leading.

randcraw 9y ago
The difference is that corporations closely monitor only their own employees while Palantir closely monitors EVERYBODY. Corporations take an interest in tracking people only to stratify them into groups suited to specific ad strategies. The worst their errors will do is pepper your browser and email with bad ads. Not so with Palantir when their tracking data can misguide police departments, credit agencies, and even your employer into making your life a living hell. Surely any company with that much power must be held MUCH more accountable than they are now.
- ng12 9y ago
  Palantir doesn't really _do_ anything. They don't collect the data, just save time/man-hours spent processing it. If that's your stance, Oracle/IBM are just as evil because they also sell to police departments to enable analysis. Facebook on the other hand is actively collecting the data. Without Facebook that database does not exist. In my mind that makes them far worse.
  - mercer 9y ago
    I think it's not a fringe opinion that Oracle/IBM are just as evil. I don't have a strong opinion on this issue at this point, but just saying.

nunya213 9y ago

Thiel is an exercise in contradiction. "In his view, the best way to avoid such scenarios in the future would be to provide the government the most cutting-edge technology possible and build in policing systems to make sure investigators use it lawfully." Prevent the police state by building the police state.

randcraw 9y ago
And then hire Palantir to monitor the police as well.
pm90 9y ago
Is it really? I think what he's trying to say is that we should have tools powerful enough to let the Government find/track people efficiently and correctly as long as there is a lawful reason for doing so. Its similar to the weak crypto arguments where Govt. agencies argue they should be able to break crypto protocols via a backdoor when there is a lawful reason to do so. That being said: the PATRIOT act and NSA's PRISM program have shown just how blatantly the US Govt. can abuse individual privacy and rights so I don't think its a good idea. Weak crypto using backdoors is just a terrible idea period. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the logic make sense in principle even though in practice it wouldn't work that way.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Perhaps what he's trying to say is, "I like money and power." "The logic" in this case is a proposition about how beings behave. That is, "We can build the largest prison system in history, give law enforcement unlimited surveillance powers and not expect massive injustices." That is simply wrong. Human beings are not like that.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- nunya213 9y ago
  For someone as deeply entrenched in Tech as Thiel you would think the "in practice" part would be quite clear to him.